


have another drink

by average_lasagna



Series: the extended death of laura vanderboom [2]
Category: Rusty Lake | Cube Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Drinking & Talking, F/M, It's About the Parallels, Out of Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:27:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27500746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/average_lasagna/pseuds/average_lasagna
Summary: "God, I hate this thing. What kind of clock has a mirror in it, anyway?"~In which Dale murders Laura and accidentally befriends her, in that order.
Relationships: Laura Vanderboom & Dale Vandermeer, Laura Vanderboom/Dale Vandermeer, Robert "Bob" Hill/Laura Vanderboom
Series: the extended death of laura vanderboom [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1806181
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	have another drink

**Author's Note:**

> Rusty Lake: we have a timeline that exists & also Laura killed herself
> 
> me: but.... what if..... what if Dale actually DID kill Laura & also we ignore the timeline completely??
> 
> hjskjdhjs basically, this is kinda the aftermath of Paradox--Dale kills Laura and reaches enlightenment, and now he lives in the hotel. this takes place sometime after Paradox and before The White Door (like, WAY before. pretend Bob is doing his own thing for the months we're ignoring. if you know anything about the timeline, tbh just forget it)
> 
> also!! this will probably make more sense if you read part one, though you don't have to.

"God, I hate this thing. What kind of clock has a mirror in it, anyway?"

Laura snorted from where she reclined on his couch. Her shoulders were tense, and her foot was perfectly flat on the floor—making it easier for her to stand should she need to—but other than that, she looked completely at ease. The dog sprawled on top of her chest, and Laura idly smoothed its fur back with one of her hands. In her other hand, she held a glass of wine. "You're so petty, Dale, you know that? I think it's nice."

He stood in front of it, studying his reflection. The clock was not _nice._ He didn't even know why Owl had placed it in Dale's room. All it did was remind him of his corrupted soul, of barely being in control of his mind, of barely having one. His fingers curling around the knife, choosing himself over Laura, choosing the lake over his humanity. Losing that humanity. 

Maybe he did know why Owl placed it there.

Dale had figured out how to switch between his forms, both deer-headed and not, but something in his eyes had permanently changed. "I killed you, and yet you think I'm nice to spend time around. I don't exactly trust your judgment."

She scoffed. “Are you even listening to me? I think you're petty, not nice.” She tilted her head up to sip from the glass. "Ugh, immortals. Never listening, always thinking you know best. If you really did know best, I'd be able to be a person and not a _projection of memories_ , or whatever the hell, tied to a goddamn lake." Her imitation of Owl's voice needed work, but it was good enough.

He rolled his eyes. "I'm not gonna listen to this, Laur. I was trying to have a quiet night in, not to entertain your moaning while you drink my wine. Shouldn't you be off choking on your own blood somewhere? I'm sure Owl's waterlogged relatives would love to hear your sob-story."

"Bastard."

"Ghost."

"That's not as much of an insult as you think it is, Bambi." 

Laura looked the same as she usually did, hair a mess and skin unhealthily pale, her mother’s dress clinging to her. She wasn’t struggling to speak, not like she sometimes did during these visits. There wasn’t even a scar on her neck. Perks of being a time-shifting dead woman, he supposed.

She sighed, setting her glass down and picking up the dog. It moved to her lap as she shifted, bringing her legs to the floor and leaving a portion of the couch free.

"C'mere," she muttered.

He blinked at her reflection. “What?”

She gestured with the glass, nearly spilling her wine, to the space she had made. There was enough for someone to sit, should they want to.

He blinked again, but closed the clock shut. It was too big for his almost empty room. The rest of the room, he could handle—it was only a bathroom and a few pieces of furniture, after all, and save for the globe that he had personally dragged from the Paradox Room, everything, his things, had already been there, in _his_ room.

But the clock, Owl’s clock, _Laura’s_ clock, had been placed there. It wasn’t his. No, what it was was too much, too big, too heavy. Too dragged down by his baggage. He entertained the thought of destroying it right then and there, splintering the wood with his own bloody hands, but he could feel Laura’s expectant gaze on the back of his head, so he turned away.

When he settled next to her, looking completely out of place compared to the way she lounged, the dog happily stumbled over. Its tail wagged when Dale scratched its head, and it relaxed in his lap contentedly.

"Oh, you're unbearable. I grew up with this pup, yet the minute he sees you, he's drooling." She scrunched up her face and pointed mock-angrily at it. "Traitor." Turning back to look at Dale, she said, "you must think you're the king of the world, huh?"

"Mhmm. Pass me the wine, would you?"

He was big enough to admit that drinking with her was far less embarrassing than drinking alone. She whined and complained and barely made sense on the best of days, true, but if he tuned her out enough, she could potentially be good company. At the very least, he could use her as an excuse when Owl brought up the kitchen's missing wine bottles in their next impromptu manipulation session.

He tried not to dwell on the fact that the wine was made from the same water she bled out in. If he was a better man, he would be disgusted at drinking it without protest. If he was a better man, Laura Vanderboom wouldn't be dead.

"Everyone here is so _weird_.” Dale couldn’t decide whether he liked this better than the obsessive silence of their earlier interactions. “The Eilander’s memories—or souls? I'm not sure—are in the lake, and they keep talking about my family. Like, all the shit we kept secret. Did you know my grandfather kept one of my mother's cousins in a well for like, thirty years? And practically killed off half the family? Fucking insane."

"I wouldn't put it past Crow."

"Aldous is my great-great-grandfather, not my grandfather. Keep up. And he's also my brother, so fuck off."

"Right,” he said. “The hermit’s _definitely_ weirder than us."

"Ugh, shut up." She pouted and took the glass back from him. He raised an eyebrow when she threw her head back and drained it. After a beat, she spoke. "God, I miss Bob."

"We're back to whining? Great."

"I said, _shut up_. No one asked for your input. You were the one whining about my clock just then. Both of my bodies have been stuffed in there; it's premium quality wood." He scoffed again, and she groaned. "See, this is why I miss Bob. He didn't have conversations like this. He never told me to eat my own heart when I said something he didn't like. He was all sweet and sincere. The opposite of us. The opposite of _weird_.” The dog sniffed. “He had this whole dream of running away from the city, away from his stupid job and my stupid memories. I loved him so much."

"Yeah? Then why'd you leave him, ghost girl? You can't pin that one on me." 

She was the source of his issues, not the other way around. His family died to get him to kill her; he got involved in her case because of her death. He lost his job, his apartment, everything, just because of her and his new mentors. They set up his life to fall into place around hers. Like every moment was a domino building up to his paradox—their paradox—which she was supposedly still dealing with. Now he had to live in Owl's strange hotel, with Laura crawling out of the lake far too often to hold her pity parties and make use of whatever drinks he had lying around. She ruined his life.

Though, he did kill her. That probably ruined some plans of her own.

"I don't know... like, my mother took my memories, right? Of literally everything. Another shiny cube for Miss Laura Ophelia. She wanted to protect me from all this, I guess, so at eighteen she just... slammed me into the real world, hidden and lost. And I think she knew it would never really work, and that this place would eventually drag me back underwater. But for the second half of my life, another eighteen goddamn years, I was free from everything. No memories to tie me down, no weirdness. Just Bob, and Harvey, too, because he's obsessed."

"God, I fucking hate that bird.”

Ignoring him, she continued. "We always end up back here, Dale. Right in the middle of the weird, because we're weird. But Bob? He was normal, so goddamn normal and sincere. I won that competition for the cabin, a getaway at Rusty Lake Mental Health and Fishing, and I just... my life was coming back, my weirdness was coming back, and I couldn't drag him down with me."

Dale could still hear the gunshot. How far gone had he been that seeing all that blood hadn't affected him in the slightest? That it still didn't? He had watched Bob blast his own brains out, and all Dale did was calmly collect his cubes and file it all away in the cabinet of his mind. Robert "Bob" Hill, 40, Case 23's first suspect and newest victim. No relatives to console, thank God. Just another statistic (though slightly less average than the rest—who else died in a theater that barely existed and woke up days later, still alive?)

It was better like this. Everything and everyone, just a file in the endless machine called Dale Vandermeer, each one eventually eaten up and forgotten. Wasn't that what made him such a good detective? He never got attached.

(He carefully avoided his mind's other cabinet, one whose muted paint peeled and chipped away endlessly. The files were old, he imagined, with worn pages that would tear at the slightest movement if Dale wasn't careful. Yet, somehow, he always knew he would be. He wasn't proud at how often he stared at the faces of his parents and grandfather, sorting through his memories of them, trying to separate the truth from Owl's cruel reenactments. These were his files that somehow survived his mind's machine, even if he wished they didn't. These were the files that mattered.

He wasn't sure how to feel about the newest edition to his depressing wonderland. Blonde hair, striking eyes, an obnoxiously cheerful dress. A constant stream of complaints, hands that stole his drinks, and a nasty wound that he had provided her with.)

"Well, that worked out. Bob is far away from our little pocket of _weird_ , as you call it. He's not being targeted by another one of Owl's elaborate schemes or anything like that. He’s still human."

Laura scowled at him. "You said you would get involved. You promised me you would."

It had been a deal, not a promise. Dale would find out what he could about her loverboy, and in return, Laura would give him information about Owl and the lake. And, really, besides telling him that she was still trapped in the paradox—constantly reliving the memories he had already escaped—she hadn't provided him with much more than gossip. He found it all terribly interesting, of course, but most of her rants, especially ones about her mother, fell into the category of “Trauma Dale Didn’t Need to Know About.”

The first time he'd complained about it, she'd fixed him with a withering look, and recited the names of his parents and grandfather, and how they died. He had flinched, but he understood her point.

They already knew too much of each other's history to be anything other than uncomfortably casual. After all, her rants said more about him than they did about her. He was the one actually letting her speak. He told himself he was only gathering ammunition—the more of her buttons he discovered, the more he could press to upset her—but he didn't have an excuse for his own moments of weakness, the times he admitted more than he should've.

Sometimes, he'd told her, he could hear the lake pounding in his head, relentlessly ripping through all of his thoughts, and he sat on the shore and wished he could drown himself. 

Sometimes when his antlers pushed their way out of him, sharp and painfully unnatural, he missed the fake ones his mother would make him wear for the holidays. 

When he wandered through the forest, twisting branches and sickeningly-green leaves overhead, he couldn't stop himself from flinching if he saw Crow.

Sometimes the sight of Owl sent him into a quiet rage; he gripped Laura's knife and imagined plunging it into the other man, stabbing him over and over until every one of his feathers was coated in blood. On other days, Dale was compelled to be near him; his praises soothed the tightness in Dale's chest, and that terrified him. It terrified him that he no longer had to chase the fleeting feeling of belonging, that he had nearly forgotten about the life he used to have, the world he never quite fit into. If he was a better man, he would miss being human. If he was a better man, Laura Vanderboom wouldn’t be dead.

He was not a better man.

(What also worried him was how easily he found himself confessing these things to her. There were days when she couldn't speak to him, when she dripped both water and blood on his carpet and held a hand to her neck to limit the damage. There were days when she wasn’t human at all, but a corrupted soul that stood motionless in his room, and he never knew how to deal with that. But there were also days when she seemed strangely content with the paradox she lived in, and her smile lacked the bite he was accustomed to. Laura was a warped woman indeed, and he wasn't sure why he found that so comforting.)

“Yeah,” he sighed, “I know, Laur. I’m working on it.” He spared a glance at the empty glass, then with another sigh, pushed himself up. The dog made an unhappy noise and clawed toward Laura while Dale walked toward the corner of his room, ignoring Laura’s aborted flinch at his sudden movement.

“What?” He didn’t look at her, but he could hear her moving. “Conversation over?”

“Mhmm.” When he entered his room—he’d been downstairs; Owl insisted he have dinner in the dining room, though Dale had never seen anyone else eat in there—Laura had already been lounging about, glass in hand. She had to have gotten the wine from somewhere, and he knew he had a bottle just like it inside his globe.

“It’s over here, Dale.” He turned toward her. She had shifted back to lying down, her legs back in his spot. The dog was back to lying on her chest, somewhat drooling. She held one arm in the air, holding the bottle toward him. With something of a half-smile, he made his way back over.

“You gonna move your feet?”

“I don’t know.” She raised an eyebrow. “Am I?”

He reached for her, and he could feel her immediately stiffen, more so than she had before, and the voice in his head sighed. The past was never dead, but things had changed; he wasn’t going to hurt her. Things were _different_. He was not a good man, but he did have power, and he only had so much respect for Owl’s orders. He pushed her legs off the couch, then sat back into his earlier place.

She stared at him. 

“What?”

Moving slow enough that he could track her movements, she brought her legs up to rest on his lap.

Dale would never admit that he short-circuited, but really, how could he not have? Who did he have in his life, that could ever compare to Laura, the reborn mind? The star he was always destined to collide with, to decimate upon impact? The woman who flinched when he moved too fast, who glanced uneasily at the knife he kept on him at all times, who insulted him and died in his arms? Sometimes, it was hard to reconcile her with the person before him, who shared Eilander gossip and drinks with him interchangeably, who relaxed against him as he killed her, who felt comfortable enough to sprawl on top of him, as if they were anything more than enemies? As if they were friends?

She was still staring at him, almost hesitantly. He meant, at the very least, to look aloof, but he couldn’t help the fond grin that spread across his face. He took the wine from her hand and looked away, but from the corner of his eye, he could see the tension in her shoulders dissipate sightly.

After a moment, his grin faded. He drew in a breath and sighed. “They don’t tell me anything about Bob. I think it’s because of you. It’s too… personal, or something like that, so they keep me here, cooped up with paperwork and vaguely homicidal urges.” He didn’t bother to reach for their glass, opting instead to take a sip directly from the bottle. “It’s like they’re scared I’ll run away.”

The dog whined, pawing at Laura, who cooed at it and resumed her earlier petting.

“Do you remember what you said to me before I killed you?”

She had told him once, what the paradox was like for her. It wasn’t how Dale had experienced it—it was always slightly different, sometimes more human, sometimes less. It reminded him of the clock. She still thought fondly of it; it was one of her constants, a never-changing fact. The things he said, the way he said them—it was always different, but the clock remained as permanent as the knife at her throat.

In her final moments, she had been numb. But in their talks, she’d been so adamant that she could change things. That, somehow, one day, she’d break the loop and get out. He had opted not to tell her about the version of her he saw in the Paradox Room, older than any other version of her he’d seen, present included.

“No.”

“You told me I wouldn’t care about this, about anything. Nothing but the lake.”

She stared at him, for a long moment. “Was I wrong?” 

And fuck, what could he say to that? How could he explain how hard he tried to save his parents, and that he would do it all again just to see them live another second? How could he show her her face in the files of his mind, tell her what it meant? How could she know that he looked forward to their conversations more than anything else Owl had him do?

Being by the lake, being a part of it, had quieted his thoughts in a way that nothing else could. It overwhelmed him, sometimes, the apathy for others that was tied to being near it, but that didn’t mean he stopped caring _completely_. He still asked about Bob, still left out seed for Harvey, still listened to Laura.

But he knew that wasn’t what she meant.

There was something to be said for someone who used their final moments to comfort their killer. _You won’t have to care anymore_ , she’d said, not to be cruel or unkind, but to help. To relieve him of the burden of her blood, to let him stare at his own hands without hating them. To help him go through with it.

She hadn’t lied. Laura Vanderboom was many things—softer than Dale’s hard edges, as forgiving as she was stubborn, a ghost masquerading with the living—but she wasn’t a liar, not when she could help it.

He _didn’t_ care. He couldn’t miss her, not with the way her paradox drew her to him, constantly keeping her near. He couldn’t regret killing her, either, not when it meant he had gotten to survive. He’d seen himself in that forest—a noose around his neck, a knife in his back, choking on poison—a deer head and a body count were nothing to a selfish man terrified of death.

The wine had water, the water had her blood, and the world collapsed around them as they drank.

The dog sniffed.

“Did it ever have a name?”

Her eyes flickered from him to the dog, the way it sleepily nuzzled against her, looking as if it had no care in the world, as if it knew it would outlive them.

A small smile sat on her lips. “I think he used to have one, way back when Aldous’ son got him. Though, my mother just called him Dog.”

“It’s just…” The dog yawned. “I find him funny, that’s all. The rest of us get immortality and run wild with it, but he’s just… a dog, same as he always was.” 

She reached to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and for a moment, Dale saw a flash of red on her neck.

He glanced at the clock. She would have to leave, soon.

“A spot of normal in our weird, surviving to the end.” Her eyes were wet as he spoke. “I think Robert would be an apt name for him, yeah?”

Laura’s breath caught. “Yeah,” she said, voice softer than he’d ever heard it, “yeah.”

He had stared across from Bob at the bar, innocent and damning, and made the man a drink. Here, there was only a bottle and an empty glass between them. “I’ll find him, Laur.”

Around them, the world collapsed. Laura fell into the water and Dale swam in after her; Crow handed Bob a gun from behind the theater bar. 

“Promise?”

The lake’s successor was not a good person, and the reborn mind couldn’t qualify as a living one. But at least, in Dale’s old hotel room already stained with blood, they had each other.

“Promise.”

**Author's Note:**

> !! tysm for everyone who encouraged me to finish this 🥺
> 
> my tumblr: rusty-pulley-stars


End file.
